


D'ni Restauration Cones

by laughingpineapple



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-20 01:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2409524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>] The little ones destroy;  <br/>] The little ones rebuild;   <br/>] The little ones remove;  <br/>] The little ones give back.<br/>(Words, 4:76÷79) </p><p>A new Tree grows and it is orange and retroreflective white.</p>
            </blockquote>





	D'ni Restauration Cones

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2008 for an Italian fanfiction contest based on creating a narrative from our own photographs, this fic was selected in 2009 to represent fanfiction as a whole in an 'anthology of Italian web-literature', along with poetic tweets, quirky Facebook statuses, narrative blogs and more Second Life than you can shake a stick at.  
> No, don't ask. I don't even know. The curator asked, I wrote to Cyan, Cyan gave its placid Cyan approval, the fic got published. In an actual book. That you can find on Amazon. Again, I don't even know. It's Uru humour for Uru nerds, what the general public is even supposed to do with all these cones will forever remain a mystery. As you read on, please imagine, if you will, being an outsider to fandom and finding this lone example of the (copious and excellent) Italian output as your sole introduction. Not Harry Potter, not Naruto, not Star Trek... Uru. And cones thereof.  
> Attending Mysterium 2014 in Spokane gave me the chance to gift Cyan a copy of the damn book with the damn fanfiction about their damn game, with this translation printed out and attached.  
> Thanks to cloudmarsh for the partial beta!

 

**Prologue: in the city of deep silence**

 

A young woman walks through the streets of D'ni, tracing the footsteps of hundreds of pilgrims: her path has been meandering for days, finding no protection from the intensity of the ruins. She tries to lose herself in their depths, but the restless call she is heeding comes from D'ni and in the cavern it can only find strength. There are no obstacles to its constant echo: the woman is alone. The dream of a restauration ended before she even heard its voice, with no red curtain and no applause: “The last group leaves at 5”, says the final notice left on the board, brief and to the point.

She does not notice them at first. In the beginning there is only a pitch dark silence draped like a cloak, blackening her thoughts – yet they are there. Small, silent, motionless groups stooping over a crack. Sentinels on the rare roofs and at the end of the docks. Lines of pilgrims before the Arch, indifferent to the rocking of the waves. At the thresholds of the restauration, where the work of humans has been cut off, they gather.

The woman sits on a crumbled wall. She does not let them out of her sight as her hand goes to the pen and notebook hanging from her belt.

 

 

 

**1\. Orange ghosts on a reddish lake**

 

There is a place, in the great underground cavern, where the majesty of Kerath's Arch is but a blurred gleam. There is a place where the only lights mirrored by the water are the lamps of the outermost neighborhoods, high above the lake's surface, makeshift stars hung between the cliffs and the fumes up above. A place where the backwash is the only noise.  
There is a place where a mystery on the horizon only reveals itself to a careful gaze.

A cone marks the spot, nailed to a floating plank.  
In this dark place, the cone searches. The cone observes. The cone is loyal to its task: it keeps its gaze on a dot drifting between the islands, its outline dark on the reddish haze. At times, a prow emerges there, or a rudder, or an oar rises from the water, and none can be a trick played by the small rocks the observer has learned to know so well, nor by the big sharp slabs with their burrowed villas in ruin.  
If the cone could be there now, swaying near one of the wharfs, it would be one step closer to the center of the lake, the great luminous Ae'gura it has never seen. Were it floating by that boat, it could maybe get stuck to its stern and then– who knows?  
The cone has studied the ripples on the water's surface and it knows that a current leads into high water, toward its destination. Every day, it waits for the current to take it along. Every day, the cone's position is the same, because it does not know that those ripples are just the touch of the great fans that breathe air into the Cavern, while its deep waters are still. Nor does the cone know about the chain that moors it to the lake's bed.  
The waves caress its plank, rocking it into a lull. D'ni is silent. The cone dreams.

Atop the hull of the distant boat, oblivious of the shore and of the passing of time, sleeps a seaweed-encrusted cone.

 

 

 

 

**2\. Lights above the tunnel**

 

Thirty.  
There is a path that leads far away from D'ni. It begins by the lake's shores and flounders through the caves around it, barely paying its respect before running upward and upward, coiling like a solenoid and eventually emerging through the surface. Twenty-six.  
This is none of the cones' concern: this path belongs to their past, when they traversed it stacked in a backpack. They will not return. But that single path is refracted into a thousand erratic reflexes as the smooth D'ni tunnels covered in nara unfold into a maze of abandoned trails. Only a hasty traveller would call them dead ends: with their gleams, precipices and calcareous formations, these forgotten corners can hold more beauty than a whole Age penned by a mediocre writer.  
Seventeen.  
And the sparks of the volcano under which they all lie have gained terrain and created new tracks. Cracks as wide as a cone.

This arch is not recent. Thirteen. Its greatness speaks of the ancient escavators that chewed stone in their maws and gave it back as thick, glossy, black coating. But those machines have been left to rust for centuries, far away from here, and there are no mechanical jaws that can free the passage from the rubble left by a long-gone earthquake.  
A cone stares at the blocked path. Ten. What lies beyond those stones? The D'ni thought it important to brave ahead, so they opened the way. Two centuries later, the DRC thought it important to brave ahead, sothey laid down explosive charges, following a project that soon lost importance and was eventually forgotten. Eight. Other cones will find out.

Not this one. This one accepts that its role is that of a part of a bigger whole. The cone weighs on the explosive's trigger and observes its beloved arch one last time, becaus in five four three two...

The cone is wrapped up in darkness and heavy leathery wings – the booming sound that resonates in its plastic shell is not the explosion's anymore, while the world outside fades and gets twisted into a new shape.  
With a shriek, the wings enveloping the cone are pulled back and the world isn't dark anymore. On the horizon, sharp triangular mountains pierce a bright orange sky, striped by white clouds.  
The Perfect Age of cones, or a bahro's sympathetic humour.

 

  
  


 

 

 

 

 

**3\. The old guard**

 

The Garden Ages of D'ni. Tame and docile in name alone: nature is their only gardener, hardly restrained. Even less in recent times.  
The occasional fountains, statues and benches, with their austere lines, only reflect the fierce wilderness surrounding them, as the true talent of the Writers who dared to imagine these worlds lay in plucking the most beautiful fruits of the Great Tree. Any subsequent work amounted to nothing more than the equivalent of polishing them on their sleeves before offering them to their kings.  
Of all this, all a cone has witnessed is snow. It so happened that, three thousand years after it was Written, a world meant to offer breeze, drizzles and romantic mists was gripped by an ice age. The cone still remembers the warmth of the chubby hand that set it on the ground, near a ruined pillar; afterwards, only bitter cold. Snow on top of it and snow inside it, as the cone slowly sank in its blanket.  
The endless winter hardened it. Its plastic cracked and washed out; a hailstorm broke its tip and the wind took it away.

Now the weeks-long rain, the first rain the cone has witnessed ever since it was brought here, is taking away so much more. Rain melts snow and takes apart the elegant coat that used to shimmer against the sky, always dark due to a thin atmosphere that cannot hold the light of day. The rain shows patches of the unknown.  
Patches of life, even though it is hard to say, from up above, if the dark shapes in the valley are dead tree trunks or if their sap survived the cold. From their darkness will come the danger. The cone does not know when it will come, nor what shape it will take, but the hand set it there and that action can only mean that a danger exists: that between the civilization that is still embodied by its ruined pillar and the Beyond lies a threshold which must not be crossed by either side.  
When the danger arrives, when it claws or leaps or hobbles forward in an indistinct horde, the cone will stand its ground. It has resisted to this day waiting for reinforcements or even just a friendly hand – it knows by now that when the danger arrives, nobody will be at its side.

The rain melts the last remnant of snow on its base; the air is dense and fraught with omens.  
From its high ground, it contemplates the blackened woodlands: they will come today. Or tomorrow. Or further still.

A dragonfly flicks its wings against the cone's stripes. The creature ignores its stalwart warning and soon disappears in the darkness.  
The cone stands alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**4\. The space of the shifting world**

 

In the beginning they found a silent blue Age. In the beginning there was a ring of land dotted by rocks and sturdy trees in bloom. Little else. A gauge stood out from the waters in the middle of the ring, but what measurements it was meant to gauge remained a mystery; in the distance, sparse jumbles of ruins with captivating lights still radiating from their windows. But the sea was ruled by strong currents and cones are not, by nature, bold.

Nonetheless, they remained steadfast against the lively local population of crabs: as soon as the creatures spotted the newcomers, they retreated toward the water, fear rising in their wide eyes, terrified by the shining spelunker helmet worn by the head of the expedition.

 

When the cones came back, the world had changed. The sea had retreated, leaving a thick fog behind, and lightning lit the horizon.

 

And again: now the little bewildered group looks upon a sea of stars. All that is left of the island and its crabs is a sprinkling of asteroids surrounded by a halo of cosmic dust.

 

Here, time seems to twist according to the whims of a higher power whose intents the cones cannot fathom, but it seems to have found peace, after so much movement and destruction. The initial unrest in the water, that later flowed into incessant storms, dissolved along with all the rest. The remaining heap of rocks is finally motionless, a stepping stone toward a possibility that has not escaped the gang: from here, they can simply go _beyond_ , in a way that is forbidden to humankind.

 

The first cone falls down the asteroid's uneven edge.

Does it float?

Space is warm and inviting. This is a living void.  
A benevolent reach tying all worlds together.

And the stars that give them light.

The stars get closer...

and closer.

 

The sound at the end of the universe is TOINK.

The cone has landed on a black metal plate, peppered by dots of phosphorescent paint. The sky is painted.

From beyond that ferrous reach comes a dull and muffled sound, like the rumbling of a waterfall.

And far above the cone, like a bright comet, still shines the spelunker helmet of their boss.

 

  
  


 

 

 

 

 

**5\. Stranger!**

 

It was bound to happen, sooner or later.

 

The boughs of the Great Tree intertwine and flourish toward the sky above all Ages, they bloom and grow apart, but never combine.

The leaves of the Tree are symbols: they stand for a world, a life existing in it and the space that world orbits in, to its very borders. All singularities find their place under the Tree's branches.

It may just happen that two of these branches, infinitely far apart in this tangle of universes, take very, very similar turns.

 

So it does eventually happen that a cone patrol watches over the linking spot of a ruined Age, abandoned by its people who knows how many years ago. An ochre dust rests undisturbed on the landscape, stretching until the horizon before it disperses into a steel grey line which in turn melts into the yellow sky. Is there a sea over there? Is it the stone of surviving cities? Spores float in foamy clots, like diminutive bouts of an out-of-season snowfall. But when they brush against a cone they do not settle down, pushed onward by a sudden gust of wind. And they, the cones, they stand there, orange, motionless and vigilant at the center of an open space on raised ground. Around them, the ochre-tinted relics of a technology long gone: eroded cut-off cables, ill-defined piles of gears, great metallic toothings disjointed from their supports.

And the Intruder.

 

The Intruder is a guardian, just as they are. Sitting tranquil and composed at the brink of a slope.

Conic, as is only right.

Bright yellow.

 

 _Ahrotan_ , rings the untold dread, throwing a cloak of dismay over the small group: _surface dweller_. Ahrotan, the Other, the Lesser.

Millennia of history weigh on the cones of D'ni, millennia of injustices. Over it all looms the voice of the timeless maiden, resonating in the farthest corner of the City with words of warning, for everyone who may listen and maybe for herself, against the perils of pride.

Her preaching falls on rubber ears as the last dwellers of D'ni do not take, do not offer and do not return, they are not Least nor arrogant: they are cones.

 

They face the stranger as equals, fixed and serene. A cloud of spores flutters between them and lands close by.  
_Shorah?_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Epilogue: The shape of Purgatory**

 

“It's interesting to note that from that trip in 1992 until now; the city has never been completely uninhabited”, said Watson.

“D'ni, the city of Ages, of other worlds died. But now it breathes again – it awaits”, echoed Yeesha.

But Yeesha's explorers now sleep in their beds in separate continents, they could not 'build a home' and went back to their own. Watson's DRC left as well: they returned to the surface to struggle with their doubts and set other cones in front of their fears.

Yet they were right. Those that remained in the city lack the hectic rhythms of humans, they are closer to stone and along with it they reason, settle, understand. The city does not heal, but it can rest. The cones dig their times and their stories along the niches in the walls, on broken bridges and under stairs, moving along geometries only known to them. They gather to surround a crack they will not fill, or to guard empty streets, or a lake that does not regain its light.

The Arch watches the watchers.

 

A sense of waiting lingers.

Of expiation for others' faults.

 

 

 

The young woman closes her notebook, now filled with sketches and the stories they inspired. Time to go.

Over her shoulder, the silence of a moving cone.

 

 _] The future is always revealed to those who wait._  
_(Words, 4:81)_

**Author's Note:**

> Prologue: you can see that it's a '08 fic because the Cavern is empty.  
> First cone: there are sightings of a ghost boat rowing far beyond the 'hoods, google it and you'll find all the spooky KI shots!  
> Second cone: loosely based on Aitrus' map and all the paths that lead to the Cavern that we never got to see  
> Third cone: just a made-up Garden Age  
> Fourth cones: a mandatory Ahnonay tribute  
> Fifth cones: a made-up Age  
> Epilogue: the quotes are legit and the shape of Purgatory in Dante's Comedy is, well. A cone.  
> I hope you had a laugh with these very serious cones, I sure had fun writing them.
> 
> 2017 edit: looks like Photobucket kicked the bucket, thanks to a kind commenter for pointing it out! I've reuploaded my photos... except for the fifth one, which I can't find in my cones folder. Googling a passable substitute gave me this: https://www.eyeem.com/p/51851884


End file.
